Cati Porter was born at Studebaker Hospital in Norwalk, California, during the summer of 1971, sixteen days after Jim Morrisson died famously in a bathtub in Paris. (Her mother is the daughter of acclaimed ceramist Brad Keeler, an important figure in the California Pottery movement. She is an avid collector of her grandfather's work and maintains a website devoted to it at Brad Keeler Artwares.)
Cati spent her childhood in Bellflower, a suburb of Los Angeles, where she participated in the Poets in the Schools program and worked with the poets Jack Grapes and Dorraine Poretz to create her first chapbook, a paste-up, saddle-stapled wonder of adolescent free verse.
When she was 15 she moved with her mother, stepfather and younger sister from Bellflower to Moreno Valley, lured by the promise of affordable housing. After graduation from high school she moved to the Tidewater area of Virgina to be closer to her biological father, stepmother, and other younger sister. There she lived and wrote for three years, took creative writing workshops with Robert Arthur, worked on the community college literary journal, and participated in her first poetry reading where she wore a borrowed dress and no shoes.
The summer she turned 21 she moved back to southern California, where she continued to write & occasionally publish, and participated in readings across the region including open mic nights at the now defunct People's Republic of Iguanaland and Java Books. She also began to take more formal writing workshops ranging in length from afternoon seminars to several days-long to weeks-long online courses, working with Christopher Buckley, Mark Doty, Richard Garcia, Jason Schneiderman, Maurya Simon, as well as a years-long correspondence-critique (yes, snail mail) with Beth Ann Fennelly.
When she was 28, two years after marrying her sweetheart at the drive-up wedding window of The Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas (recently brought back into the spotlight by Brittney Spears and Sinead O'Connor), and while she was big and pregnant with her first child, she was invited by Gayle Brandeis to join a writing group that Gayle was forming with another local poet, Judy Kronenfeld, and which consisted of a crew of other seasoned woman-poets. Around this time she also joined the Women's Poetry Listserv, a truly invaluable resource, and began reading every book on craft she could get a hold of.
In 2008, the summer she turned 37, her first collection of poetry, small fruit songs: prose poems, was published by Pudding House Publications, followed later that year by Seven Floors Up, a full-length collection of poems in various forms (abecedarian to free verse to villanelle) published by Mayapple Press.
While she did attend both Tidewater Community College and Riverside Community College, she left school before completing her degree when she became pregnant with her first son. Nevertheless, she was determined to pursue an MFA. She petitioned for a waiver of the Bachelor's Degree requirement, which she was granted, and in 2010, at the age of 39, Cati received her MFA in Poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles' Master of Fine Arts program.
That same summer Chicago-based Dancing Girl Press published (al)most delicious, a chapbook of ekphrastic persona poems after Modigliani's nudes, followed in 2011 by Ahadada Books' release of her e-book, what Desire makes of us, an exploration of what it might mean to be literally consumed by desire. This free electronic chapbook includes illustrations by her sister, Amy Joy Payne, a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University's Bachelor of Fine Arts program.
(See "Books" and "Chapbooks" pages for links and more information.)
Her current project is a manuscript-in-progress titled My Skies of Small Horses, which was a semi-finalist for the 2010 Antivenom Prize and 2010 & 2011 Elixir Press Poetry Prize. From this collection, her poem "Miss Carriage" won So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Literature and Art's poetry competition, judged by Arielle Greenberg. Also from this collection, her poem "Greed" was a finalist for Crab Creek Review's poetry competition, judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
Her poems have been anthologized in Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel – Second Floor (No Tell Books), Letters to the World: Poems from the Women's Poetry Listserv (Red Hen Press), and White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood (Demeter Press), and are forthcoming in Fat Gold Watch, an anthology of works inspired by Sylvia Plath, and Women Write Resistance (Blue Light Press).
In addition to her own writing, Cati is dedicated to promoting the work of other writers: In 2005 she founded Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry; published twice per year, Poemeleon hosts occasional readings, The Habitual Poet Contributor Interview Series, and The Mystery Box Contest. In 2010, in partnership with the Inlandia Institute, she founded Inlandia: A Literary Journey. Also for the Inlandia Institute, she is Chair of both the Publications and Literary Laureate Selection committees, and a member of the Advisory Council. She currently teaches a seasonal, multi-genre Creative Writing Workshop for Inlandia in Ontario, California.
Cati Porter lives in Riverside, California, with her husband and two young sons.